Back in the day we marvelled at ‘search’. It was like questioning the all-seeing internet oracle and being granted a whole world of knowledge. How we laughed when it threw up weird fuzzy-logic responses. Remember the rumour that the world would end if you typed ‘google’ into Google!? Not any more. Now you want the one result you’re looking for, and you want it now! Enter Bing – the new search, or should I say ‘decision’, engine from Microsoft. Its aim? To shift work from consumers to search engines – actually answering more queries on the search engine page itself, without having to click through to the result. You enter ‘weather’, it’ll give you an instant forecast based on your IP address/location. You enter ‘flights’, it’ll tell you whether the fares are likely to go up by tomorrow morning. Is it really so new though? Google already offers much of this functionality. Also, I think it might get on my nerves after a while. Like some over keen minion that jumps to conclusions before I’ve even finished a sentence. If the inference is wrong, I’ll have to start all over again anyway. Ho hum. They are throwing a multi-million dollar campaign at it though. Will it be enough to make people switch from Google though? We’ll have to wait and see.
